Table of contents for Rum v2 in Rum

Drinking rum evokes various reactions – to the flavour, the experience, the occasion. This may result in a smile that says a lot, or a verbal reaction that says it all. There’s no need to understand the intricacies of the ageing process to appreciate a rum. But for some of us, details are a vital part of the enjoyment and appreciation of a rum. The range of aged rums continues to grow broader and older, but whatever the age, the quality remains the same. It’s the flavours that change. Longer or shorter ageing isn’t better or worse, it’s different, and whether more senior or more youthful flavours are preferable is entirely personal. The influence that ageing has on rum was only discovered accidentally. Rum was originally consumed unaged, and exported…

In the world of whisky, independent bottlers do a roaring trade – launching exclusive liquids to avid drinkers, fetching prices at auction to rival luxury single malts, and reviving long-lost distilleries through limited-edition bottlings. With demand for premium sipping rums growing, some in the industry have wagered that such a business model could work with cane, as well as grain, spirits. One of the most established names on the block is Italian bottler Velier. Founded in 1947 as a wine and spirits importer and distributor, it was purchased in 1983 by world-renowned rum aficionado Luca Gargano. He began importing rums from the Caribbean in the 1990s, building relationships with distillers and collaborating with them on joint bottlings. To date Velier has worked with producers including Foursquare in Barbados, Appleton and…

WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE AND INTERESTING COUNTRIES AND PLACES THAT YOUR WORK HAS TAKEN YOU? I think the most interesting place, or rather somewhere I had so many pre-conceptions about, that really surprised and delighted me was a recent visit to Ukraine. I had always assumed it would be very grey with post-Communist architecture and like stepping back 20 years, especially when it came to the bar and restaurant scene. I was very wrong. It’s an incredible country and Kiev is a stunning city with amazing history, people, food and culture and some of the best bars I have ever been to. It really is a hidden gem and I encourage anyone to visit. The most memorable bar I was taken to was called Loggerhead. Hidden…

When Homère Clément purchased the Domaine de l’Acajou plantation in Martinique in 1887, it was not an opportune time to be investing in sugar. The introduction of sugar beet and the increasing availability of cheap South American products meant the sugar trade on the island, long renowned as having optimal terroir for sugarcane cultivation, was in turmoil. Not long after the purchase, Domaine de l’Acajou – close to the town of Le Francois, of which Clément was mayor – went the way of many other plantations in Martinique and was declared bankrupt. However, its new owner invested heavily in the 43-acre estate and brought it back to prominence – not for its sugar, but world-class rum. Clément tasked the estate planters to harvest the sugarcane and press it to extract…

How do we get the high-proof rum we love so much? Well, you must start with fermentation, a process that happens pretty much on its own with fresh sugarcane juice or diluted molasses. A controlled fermentation process with yeast can quickly create an alcoholic beverage of reasonable strength. But if you want to get to spirit strength, you need to distil the wine, and that is a process that relies on the rather convenient fact that alcohol – more specifically ethanol – has a boiling point that is lower than that of water. By carefully heating your wine, you can collect the alcoholic vapour and condense it back to a liquid. The oldest method of distillation is to use a pot still, producing alcohol in batches, separating the undesirable components…

Jim Meehan has the easy personality and banter of a man who’s used to interacting with people. It’s a natural consequence of spending decades behind bars, and his global brand-building and ambassadorial work for Banks Rum. His introduction to the spirits industry started like so many others – bartending in college “to pay for books and beer”. He was simultaneously volunteering at a hospital, working towards becoming a doctor. “I decided at that time I had to change careers and I started interviewing all the adults with real jobs. Most, whether they were doctors or lawyers or professors, said the happiest moment of their day was when they arrived at the bar. I loved the job, the physicality of it, meeting all these different people, so I decided I wanted…

WES BURGIN Facebook: Thefatrumpirate Website: www.thefatrumpirate.com HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE WORLD OF RUM? We went on holiday to Spain one year and upon visiting a local supermarket I noticed a bottle of Bardinet Negrita Rum. I’d never drunk “dark rum” and didn’t really understand what it was, so I bought a bottle. Four bottles later, I realised I’d found a new tipple. DESCRIBE YOUR ACTIVITIES AS A RUM INFLUENCER. ’m primarily a rum reviewer and blogger. I’ve posted around 700 reviews of rum and cachaça since starting my site in 2015. I also write opinion pieces and write-ups on rum events. I am the admin and creator of The UK Rum Club (along with Steven James of Rum Diaries Blog) and the Saint Lucia Rum Appreciation Society. I’m…

Of all the novel ingredients to hit the drinks market in the past few years, CBD and cannabis-derived products have perhaps been some of the most pervasive and widely utilised, from health drinks to flavoured rums. But a distiller in the Channel Islands is attempting to set his cannabis-infused product apart from others on the market. Indica Rum, a blended spirit that features rum distilled with buds from the cannabis plant species of the same name, is the latest release from the Channel Island Liquor Company. It opened its first distillery in Guernsey in June 2016, has won multiple awards for its Wheadon’s Rock Samphire and Pink Grapefruit gins, and opened a second site, the Sail Loft Distillery in Jersey, in November 2019. The company’s co-founder Luke Wheadon had been…

It took a while to reach our destination. A flight from London to Barbados, followed by a 60-minute island-hopping tin plane jaunt and half-hour boat ride, and my friends and I were greeted at the pier by husband and wife management team Matt and Anie Semark, resplendent with a tray of Piña Coladas. Drink in hand, we were each driven by Mini Moke (a deceptively nippy open-top buggy) to one of 22 private villas. Our collective sighs of relief could have lifted the island out of the sea Petit St Vincent, or PSV, is a 115-acre droplet of land and luxury resort at the southernmost point of the Caribbean’s St Vincent and the Grenadines. Its life as a resort has its beginnings in 1962, when US Air Force colleagues Hazen K.…

In the year or so since Josh first shared his considered take on sustainability, we have seen many steps taken across the industry to work in a more ethical, greener manner. From relatively simple, such as installing solar panels at Foursquare Distillery in Barbados – a move that generates the majority, if not all of the power requirements for the facility – to Bacardí looking to move to a plant polymer-based bottle which will biodegrade after 18 months – a strong step given the thousands of tons of plastic bottles produced annually. Both moves are obvious direct action, but it is the more widespread recognition of the Bonsucro organisation that is as important, yet less noticeable to the end consumer. With something like 95 per cent of the rum in the…

As hard as some may try to ignore the fact, and as far as some think we may have moved past it, the history of the rum industry is intrinsically linked to slave labour – specifically that of enslaved African peoples who harvested sugarcane on vast plantations in the Caribbean for the profit of white European settlers. As painful as this history is, it is only by acknowledging it that we can open a pathway to talk about the future – and it’s far less black and white than the industry’s past. Rum today is a multifaceted, multicultural industry that is more in touch with its roots than it ever has been, but for this to continue in an age where consumers demand more transparency, companies – particularly in the white…

Coming into possession of multiple flagons of decades-old rum would be an exciting turn of events for most spirits producers. For British company Elixir Distillers, it caused a pivot from whisky production into rum blending. Elixir’s co-founder Sukhinder Singh (of The Whisky Exchange fame) was offered a flagon of some of the remaining rum from the British Navy rations – abolished in 1970 – by an ex-sailor. This led to him tracking down and purchasing all the remaining flagons and creating Black Tot Last Consignment, released in 2010. According to Olivier Chilton, head blender at Elixir Distillers, the premium rum category “didn’t really exist” at that time. “Eventually we began to build a brand around the Black Tot story, which resulted in the launch of Black Tot Finest Caribbean in…

WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE AND INTERESTING COUNTRIES AND PLACES THAT YOUR WORK HAS TAKEN YOU? My work with Don Papa has brought me to places I could only dream of visiting. For me, the most memorable country I’ve been to was Japan, which was a market I handled for the brand earlier in my career. It’s a place with so much juxtaposition of a highly modern world, but still with tradition and culture at its very core – definitely something out of a sci-fi film. WHAT RUM AND OTHER SPIRITS DO YOU LIKE TO BUY IN DUTY FREE WHEN TRAVELLING OVERSEAS? One thing I look for in airports and duty free is exclusive special-edition spirits that would go well with Don Papa. A special flavour of…

An innocuous meeting of minds can give rise to great things. If John, George, Paul and Ringo hadn’t started making music together, the ‘Britpop’ movement may not have reached such global prominence. If Steve Jobs hadn’t returned to Apple in the 1990s and worked with designers to revolutionise its product line, one of the world’s most famous brands may have faded into obscurity. Similarly (albeit on a smaller scale), when businessmen Denis Barnard and John Van Geest joined forces in 1972 to strengthen their Caribbean spirits companies, they forged a new future for rum in Saint Lucia. Like many other West Indian islands, sugar was the main crop in Saint Lucia; the estates that produced it often supported an on-site distillery to deal with a waste product from the process,…

The world of rum is already diverse compared to all other spirit categories. However, even with all the widely recognised diversity, there are still some contemporary spirits – cousins to rum, if you will – that are so close they are difficult to ignore. Cachaça is a self-contained sugarcane spirit category cousin – sufficiently defined to stand separate. What about an alternative source such as panela, or rapadura (aka chancaca, piloncillo, jaggery or gur) that does not fall into any widely recognised camp? It is worth pointing out that some producers attempt to use sorghum or sugar beet to make their ‘rum’ and this is outside the field of play – whatever spirit arises from using these sources, it is not rum. Under UK/EU/US regulations, rum is made from sugarcane…

We are very proud to present the results of the World Rum Awards 2021. These winners represent the cream of the crop in the global rum industry and it is our pleasure and privilege to be able to celebrate them in this competition. It has been an incredibly challenging year for all corners of the spirits industry, with rum being no exception, and we must commend the producers in these pages for continuing to strive for excellence. Their outstanding efforts have helped the industry not only to survive, but to thrive in the past 12 months. We hope you enjoy perusing the results, which encompass taste (p90-94) and design (p95-97). A 1710 Bête À Feu 50.9% “Almost industrial alcohol note, but some nice cut cane and green fruit character also.…

Move over pineapple – when it comes to flavouring rums, banana is now the ‘à la mode’ choice. The tropical fruit, which had made an appearance previously in releases such as Hoxton Spirits’ Banana Rum and Banana Bomb spiced rum from Rockstar Spirits, came into its own last year with as established and fringe brands added banana-flavoured expressions to their ranges. Spiced rum brand RedLeg released its Banana Rum in September, the second flavoured expression in its range after its Pineapple Rum. To make the spirit, RedLeg’s original Spiced Rum (infused with vanilla and ginger) was infused with 100 per cent natural banana. Ian Macleod Distillers revived a historical banana rum recipe through its Langs Rum brand last autumn. Distilled in pot and column stills, the rum is a blend…

Depending on your aesthetics, a pot still is a beautiful sight: all that gleaming copper, curvaceous shapes and a neck ascending proudly. It’s a shame we can’t also see what’s happening within, though even if a camera could be operated inside a pot still the numerous reactions that take place would hardly all be visible. At least the changes that occur are evident when comparing what goes in, to what comes out of a pot still. “I’m a pot still girl,” says Joy Spence, Appleton Estate’s celebrated master blender. “I love the funkiness of it, and it’s just so complex and intriguing.” Distillation is a natural focal point, but each stage of the production process also depends on its predecessors. Without fermentation providing the right opportunities, distillation wouldn’t be able…

Sugarcane juice rums (or rhums) represent a unique proposition in that they directly reflect an agricultural crop. By contrast, molasses comes from sugarcane grown for sugar production, so has been subjected to a great deal of transformation along the way. Molasses is a wonderful thing to make rum from; still naturally sweet and filled with all manner of good things, it will remain the default globally, but the use of freshly pressed juice can offer a lot more. While it is commonplace to see the word ‘agricole’ used as a coverall for all sugarcane juice rums, it is a protected term under EU regulations. It applies specifically to rums/rhums from the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Marie Galante, French Guyana, Reunion and Madeira, and its convenience has seen it widely adopted…

Flavoured rums do not need any explanation – the name is self-explanatory, but it is easy to dismiss out of hand what is becoming a remarkably diverse category. There are different ways to add flavour, and other presentation styles, some of which have history and tradition. Mass-market brands such as Captain Morgan Spiced, Kraken, and Sailor Jerry may not represent craft production’s pinnacle, but they have huge sales volumes – a commercial success story, even if they are not necessarily critically acclaimed. Meanwhile, brands such as Sailor Jerry tap into tattoo culture, broadening consumer appeal. Moving beyond the widely used vanilla, cinnamon, clove, ginger and nutmeg flavourings, we find producers using more innovative botanicals and maceration to create entirely new flavour profiles. There is lots of room to innovate to…

CHAIRMAN’S MAI TAI A classic rum-based cocktail, the Mai Thai pairs citrus and fruit flavours with a combination of rums. This version from Chairman’s Reserve suggests pairing spiced rum with a Martinique agricole. • 30ml (1oz) Chairman’s Reserve• 30ml (1oz) Martinique rhum, such as Clément• 30ml (1oz) fresh lime juice• 15ml (0.5oz) orange Curaçao• 15ml (0.5oz) orgeat• 7.5ml (0.25oz) sugarcane syrup• Fresh mint, to garnish Add the ingredients to a mixing glass. Add plenty of crushed ice, then shake well for around 10 seconds. Pour unstrained into a double Old Fashioned glass, sink in your spent lime shell, and garnish with a mint sprig. LIME IN DA COCONUT DAIQUIRI This simple cocktail from Breckenridge Distillery mixes spiced rum with lime and vanilla for a truly tropical drinking experience. • 60ml…

MAD CITY POMEGRANATE MOJITO A classic Mojito is a great way to get the party started, and this version using Mad City Botanical Rum has a jewel-coloured pomegranate twist for extra flavour and freshness. • Fresh mint leaves• 50ml (1.6oz) Mad City Botanical Rum• 15ml (0.5oz) fresh lime juice• 12.5ml (0.4oz) simple sugar syrup• 10 pomegranate seeds, plus extra to garnish In a highball glass, combine five mint leaves, the lime juice and simple syrup and muddle together. Fill the glass three-quarters full with crushed ice, add the Mad City Botanical Rum and 10 pomegranate seeds, then stir and churn the ingredients around to mix well. Top with soda water and garnish with two mint sprigs and some more pomegranate seeds. Home bar hack: No crushed ice? Fill a resealable…

Understanding rum is not straightforward for the uninitiated. There are plenty of reviewers offering their feedback on tasting profiles, or their ratings. What does a 3/5 score mean to you if you do not understand the rum? The thing with technical reviews is that a high score generally means that the bottling is very well realised in what it is trying to be – but is that a guarantee you are going to like it? That very much depends on your preferences and where you are on your rum journey. Broad-brush colonial model categorisations are often quoted, but are a little loose; the Gargano Classification (pictured, bottom right) gives more detail. SPANISH / LATIN STYLE Rums loosely grouped as Spanish or Latin in style tend to be easy-going – the rum…

WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE AND INTERESTING COUNTRIES AND PLACES THAT YOUR WORK HAS TAKEN YOU? Well, the obvious answer would be the Caribbean… I will always be particularly fond of Jamaica and Barbados – not only as those are the islands that our rum is from, but also because I think they are the islands that best encapsulate the wonder of the Caribbean. The less obvious answer (but equally memorable) would be the Czech Republic. It was our first export territory (we now have 16), but visiting the country showed me what a globally loved spirit rum is. Wherever you are it unites people, and creates fun and memorable times. WHAT RUM AND OTHER SPIRITS DO YOU LIKE TO BUY IN DUTY FREE WHEN TRAVELLING OVERSEAS?…